The Shechinah, or the
feminine sacred in the musics of the Jewish Mediterranean

When
I first formulated this article and undertook research
for it, I intended it quite specifically to provide a
case study contributing to the larger theme of "Music as
Representation of Gender in Mediterranean Cultures"
dealt with during the meeting of the ICTM Study Group on
"Music and Anthropology in Mediterranean
Cultures" held in Venice, June 1998.

My strategy was one of beginning locally, that is,
with a very fundamental instance of gender in Jewish
music and to examine the ways it could be expanded to
Mediterranean Jewish communities. For any scholar working
in Jewish Studies, the shechinah, the feminine
presence of God, most familiarly represented in the
metaphor of the Sabbath bride, was an obvious case, a locus
classicus rich with metaphorical importance in the
local ritual of the synagogue and its musical practices.
In the Friday evening liturgy of every Jewish synagogue,
the Sabbath bride arrives and assumes a presence in the
life of the community when it gathers for prayer, and
then she departs when the community disperses at the
conclusion of Sabbath prayers, only to return for the
next Sabbath. The arrival of the Sabbath bride, moreover,
takes place in the form of a song, "Lcha
dodi," and its physical performance physically
represents her entrance into the synagogue.

As I explored the dimensions of the shechinah,
however, it became increasingly difficult to restrain its
focus on the local. What had been a metaphor became a
metonym, and in turn my focus shifted to the
Mediterranean in a much more complex sense. In other
words, a paper that had begun as an attempt to locate
gender had turned into an essay in which gender in its
multifaceted dimensions provides a means of making a much
more sweeping argument about Jewish music in the
Mediterranean and, in fact, about the ontology of Jewish
music and the metaphysics of Jewish musical thought. By
privileging gender in this way, I am not simply
sayingor just sayingthat gender is
everywhere in the music of the Jewish Mediterranean. What
I am sayingand I want to make this point as
unequivocally as possible in this prologueis that
what Jewish music is, that is, how "Jewish
music" takes shape as a way of thinking about and
expressing Jewishness, results from the ways gender
creates time and space in the Jewish Mediterranean, and
the ways in which a gendered Mediterranean world and
history serve as the template for Jewish selfness and lay
the boundaries that distinguish Jewish otherness.

In this article gender therefore assumes various forms
in the different cases of Mediterranean Jewish music that
I examine. Although I take recourse in a representational
language that employs traditional gender
binarismsfemale and male, feminine and
masculinethis language is for the most part
inadequate to describe the ways in which music and gender
interact and intersect. Male and female, in fact, coexist
in the different cases I examine here, and music provides
a means of understanding just how that interaction takes
place, how it maps a much more complex landscape of
in-betweenness on Jewish cultural history in the
Mediterranean. The following examples are not homologous,
but I wish to suggest that they are morphologous, and it
is in the representational capacity of the shechinah
that we might understand the deeper meanings of their
shared morphology.